Bay Bridge

What do you do if you run out of gas in the middle of the Harbor Tunnel? This was the question posed to me by a Sun colleague, photographer Barbara Haddock-Taylor, who came distressingly close to experiencing that particular public humiliation. Fortunately, she had just enough fumes to make it to a gas station. More generally, what do you do when dismal automotive events occur at the worst possible places? Let us define "worst possible places" as busy traffic bottlenecks where a lack of shoulder space gives any motorist the potential to become a one-person traffic jam -- not to mention a serious hazard to oneself and others.

Gasoline prices in the region are at near-record levels. Hotel rates are up 13 percent since last year. The roads, bridges and tunnels are going to be crawling with police. And more Marylanders will be on the road this Memorial Day weekend than ever before. That's the forecast from AAA Mid-Atlantic and Maryland police agencies as they look forward to a weekend of near-perfect spring weather, lavish consumer spending and clogged transportation corridors. Mahlon G. "Lon" Anderson, a spokesman for AAA, told a news conference yesterday on Kent Island that the auto club's polling shows it should be a banner weekend for travel to Ocean City and other resorts close to the Baltimore-Washington region.

Nighttime lane closings on the Bay Bridge will extend into the fall of 2009 - about six months later than planned - because of changes in the Maryland Transportation Authority's plan for replacing the deck of the westbound span. Geoffrey Kolberg, the toll facility authority's chief engineer, said yesterday that plans for redecking the bridge were changed after consultations with contractors American Bridge and URS. Instead of using a two-step process for replacing slabs of pavement, the authority will adopt a less ambitious but more expensive three-step process that doesn't demand as precise measurements on the first try. "It's a better way of doing it," said authority spokeswoman Cheryl Sparks.

The Bay Bridge road surface you might be driving on next summer lies in stacks today in a weedy, open-air storage area on the sprawling Sparrows Point steel mill complex. It is there that a contractor for the Maryland Transportation Authority is fabricating the immense sections of bridge deck that will be put aboard tractor-trailers and barged down to the Bay Bridge, where they will be put together as if pieces in a giant puzzle. The transport operation is expected to begin in the middle of this month.

Two-way traffic on the westbound span of the Bay Bridge does not appear to have been a factor in causing the seven-vehicle crash that killed three Eastern Shore residents Thursday, a top police official said yesterday. Marcus L. Brown, chief of the Maryland Transportation Authority Police, said at a news conference yesterday that it might take two months to complete the investigation of the devastating chain-reaction accident -- set off when a trailer came unhitched from the sport utility vehicle that was pulling it. Yesterday, police identified the those killed in the crash as Randall R. Orff, 47, and his son, Jonathan R. Orff, 19, both of Millington in Kent County, and James H. Ingle, 44, of Preston in Caroline County.

Responding to a federal appeal, Maryland's transportation secretary ordered last night new inspections of 10 Maryland bridges of a design similar to the Minnesota bridge that collapsed into the Mississippi River on Wednesday evening. Secretary John D. Porcari assured residents that the state's bridges are sound. "No Marylander should be concerned about the safety of our bridges," he said at a news conference earlier in the day. "When our bridges need repair, it's a priority. We make it happen."

If Hillary won't do it, they could always run Julian Bond for mayor of Baltimore.Everyone who is surprised that Chinese Communists would spy on this country, take two steps back and sit down.Advisers recommend doubling the president's salary to $400,000 to attract top candidates like Kweisi.There's nothing wrong with the drive to OC that another Bay Bridge wouldn't fix.Pub Date: 5/31/99

STEVENSVILLE -- It begins in the still-dark hours of the morning as a ribbon of headlights flashing across the graceful steel and concrete curve of the westbound Bay Bridge.The workaday trek to Annapolis, Baltimore or Washington is documented by 12,000 commuter tickets collected at tollbooths from motorists who have discovered they can have it both ways -- working in higher-paying jobs in or near the cities while enjoying the peace of an Eastern Shore lifestyle.While all five counties of the Upper Shore report increasing numbers of residents willing to drive from Easton, Denton or Chestertown to work "across the bay," it is Queen Anne's County -- especially Kent Island and other close-in communities along U.S. 50 and 301 -- that continues to lure new residents.

A BOOMING economy and balmy weather have helped draw a steady stream of people to regional resort towns in recent weeks.Most of those heading to the beach can gather the two-way $2.50 toll for the bay bridge by collecting change from under the floor mats and in the ashtrays and cup holders of their cars.Back in Baltimore, that amount could go far. It could cover the increase in entry fees for 10 children at any one of the city's neighborhood swimming pools.The 25-cent increase in the admission price at 14 such pools this season, up from 75 cents to $1, is enough to keep many children from enjoying temporary relief from the heat.

THE U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was right to seek further studies before approving a controversial open-water dumping area near the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.A campaign of distortion and misinformation has inflamed the situation and imperiled the future of the port of Baltimore.Here's the situation: To keep shipping channels in the bay open, some 4 million cubic yards of material is dredged annually. Where to put this material -- nearly all of which is uncontaminated sandy fill -- is a sticky question.

My father made iron things - tooth gears and turnbuckles, flanges and valves - thousands of cast-iron parts for machines and manufacturing systems in dozens of factories during the height of post-World War II industrial production. He and his band of foundry brothers took pride in all that. It was hot, dirty and heavy labor, but every foundry man I knew took a moment now and then to admire a perfectly cast, clean-grinded widget needed for a growing American economy. Of course, most of those cast-iron things are probably gone now. A lot of the machinery for which my father made parts became obsolete.

Making your way across the jetty at Sandy Point State Park is like walking on bowling balls. Wet ones. The rocks have a way of channeling feet this way and that into the nasty spaces between them, a perfect geometric formula for sending a tackle box one way and a rod the other in the best case, or delivering a skinned knee, an ankle sprain or worse. Despite trying conditions, anglers take their chances for access to the Chesapeake Bay to fish in the shadow of the Bay Bridge. Why? They don't have boats, and the state of Maryland, for all of its shoreline, has few places for those folks to wet a line.

The Maryland Transportation Authority is warning of "significant delays" at the Bay Bridge this Labor Day weekend as travelers grasp for a last few precious hours of summer beach time. The authority is predicting that 366,000 vehicles will traverse the bridge between today and Monday. By a simple count, that would make the bridge the third-busiest of Maryland's toll facilities this weekend. The authority is projecting that the Fort McHenry Tunnel will carry 473,000 vehicles this weekend - edging out the 467,000 on the toll road stretch of Interstate 95 northeast of Baltimore.

AAA renewed a call to limit two-way traffic on the Bay Bridge on Monday, the first anniversary of the accident that sent a truck driver plunging to his death in the water below. "Two-way traffic on the bridge continues to frighten a number of motorists," said Ragina C. Averella, manager of public and government affairs for AAA Mid-Atlantic. "We're urging the Maryland Transportation Authority to minimize the use of two-way traffic, to use it only when absolutely necessary, and - most importantly - to find acceptable barrier separation technology that they can use on the bridge."

Are you ready to pay higher tolls at Maryland toll facilities to widen a highway whose benefits you'll never use and which puts Baltimore at a competitive disadvantage? It's not out of the question. Ben Ross of the Action Committee for Transit raised that possibility while we were chatting the other day about the proposed $4.6 billion project to widen Interstate 270 by adding two express toll lanes in each direction. Ross is not exactly unbiased. He doesn't like the proposed project - which has been backed by the Montgomery County Planning Board and some County Council members there - on environmental grounds.

Travelers confronted today with crossing the Chesapeake Bay and major rivers like the Potomac and Susquehanna or lesser obstacles such as the Patapsco, Bush or Gunpowder usually travel over bridges or through tunnels. But for a long time, crossing Maryland's waterways meant taking a ferry. In Chesapeake Ferries: A Waterborne Tradition 1636-2000, a new book posthumously published by the Maryland Historical Society, Chestertown author Clara Ann Simmons recalls that colorful era in tidewater maritime transportation.

Some of Maryland's most important, and vulnerable, transportation choke points are the toll bridges and tunnels run by the Maryland Transportation Authority. From the Bay Bridge to the Fort McHenry Tunnel, these are heavily traveled links in the transportation grid, and should any of them fail, the consequences would be disastrous. That's why last week's recommendations by an independent panel of engineering experts to significantly upgrade the authority's bridge and tunnel inspection program - and the agency's apparent willingness to do so - are clearly a step in the right direction.

Road crews plan to begin a project Monday night to strengthen the guardrails on the Bay Bridge, continuing to resolve problems discovered in the aftermath of last summer's fatal crash on the major route that summer travelers take to the Eastern Shore. After a tractor-trailer barreled through a reinforced concrete wall last August and plunged into the Chesapeake Bay, investigators using ultrasound and ground-penetrating radar discovered that some bolts attaching the concrete barriers to the bridge had corroded and others were in danger of doing so. The Maryland Transportation Authority installed L-shaped brackets at the bottom of the barriers as an emergency repair in August and September 2008.

A panel of engineering experts convened after a crash last year in which a truck broke through a barrier wall and plunged off the Bay Bridge has recommended that the Maryland Transportation Authority beef up its procedures for inspecting the state's toll bridges and tunnels and open the process to more scrutiny from the public. But the panel, made up of seven top transportation engineers from around the country, rejected contentions that the authority should commission an independent inspection of the Bay Bridge.

CHESTER - -The Cohen family thought they would beat much of the typical Memorial Day beach traffic by leaving Bethany Beach early in the day Monday. Not so much, they discovered. Sherry and Buddy Cohen, their son, daughter and a family friend, packed into their car at 11:30 a.m., but by 4:15 p.m. hadn't yet crossed the Bay Bridge. The Pikesville family joined hordes of other people who just couldn't take sitting in the car anymore and had stopped at a McDonald's a few miles from the bridge for a break.